Stueyman has added a photo to the pool:

Sunset over the Shoalwater Islands, WA

John from Brisbane has added a photo to the pool:

Not quite a dock but Manly Jetty in Brisbane's southern bayside. The further you get away from the Brisbane River, the less silty the sand. If you enlarge or zoom in you will see two close islands in the distance.

The one on the left is St Helena which for many years (1867-1932 approx) was a penal settlement (unlike much of Australia, not for transported convicts). See link below. It's accessible if you have a boat but the far better way is to take a guided tour including the boat trip which will give you a good backgrounder of its use and misuse. The other island, to the right is Green Island which is only accessible if you own a boat or are a darn good and brave swimmer in which case you will find yourself on a deserted island with just mangroves, crabs and birds.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Helena_Island_National_Park

Meta plans to cut roughly 10% of staff in its Reality Labs division, with layoffs hitting metaverse-focused teams hardest. Reuters reports: The cuts to Reality Labs, which has roughly 15,000 employees, could be announced as soon as Tuesday and are set to disproportionately affect those in the metaverse unit who work on virtual reality headsets and virtual social networks, the report said. [...] Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who oversees Reality Labs, has called a meeting on Wednesday and has urged staff to attend in person, the NYT reported, citing a memo. [...]

The metaverse had been a massive project spearheaded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who prioritized and spent heavily on the venture, only for the business to burn more than $60 billion since 2020. [...] The report comes as the Facebook-parent scrambles to stay relevant in Silicon Valley's artificial intelligence race after its Llama 4 model met with a poor reception.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

22 years ago, developer and columnist John Gruber released Markdown, a simple plain-text formatting system designed to spare writers the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags. As technologist Anil Dash writes in a long piece, Markdown has since embedded itself into nearly every corner of modern computing.

Aaron Swartz, then seventeen years old, served as the beta tester before its quiet March 2004 debut. Google eventually added Markdown support to Docs after more than a decade of user requests; Microsoft put it in Notepad; Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, and Apple Notes all support it now. Dash writes: The part about not doing this stuff solely for money matters, because even the most advanced LLM systems today, what the big AI companies call their "frontier" models, require complex orchestration that's carefully scripted by people who've tuned their prompts for these systems through countless rounds of trial and error. They've iterated and tested and watched for the results as these systems hallucinated or failed or ran amok, chewing up countless resources along the way. And sometimes, they generated genuinely astonishing outputs, things that are truly amazing to consider that modern technology can achieve. The rate of progress and evolution, even factoring in the mind-boggling amounts of investment that are going into these systems, is rivaled only by the initial development of the personal computer or the Internet, or the early space race.

And all of it -- all of it -- is controlled through Markdown files. When you see the brilliant work shown off from somebody who's bragging about what they made ChatGPT generate for them, or someone is understandably proud about the code that they got Claude to create, all of the most advanced work has been prompted in Markdown. Though where the logic of Markdown was originally a very simple version of "use human language to tell the machine what to do", the implications have gotten far more dire when they use a format designed to help expresss "make this **bold**" to tell the computer itself "make this imaginary girlfriend more compliant".

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court will hear a case that could invalidate the Federal Communications Commission's authority to issue fines against companies regulated by the FCC. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile challenged the FCC's ability to punish them after the commission fined the carriers for selling customer location data without their users' consent. AT&T convinced the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to overturn its fine (PDF), while Verizon lost in the 2nd Circuit and T-Mobile lost in the District of Columbia Circuit. Verizon petitioned (PDF) the Supreme Court to reverse its loss, while the FCC and Justice Department petitioned (PDF) the court to overturn AT&T's victory in the 5th Circuit. The Supreme Court granted both petitions to hear the challenges and consolidated the cases in a list of orders (PDF) released Friday. Oral arguments will be held.

In 2024, the FCC fined the big three carriers a total of $196 million for location data sales revealed in 2018, saying the companies were punished "for illegally sharing access to customers' location information without consent and without taking reasonable measures to protect that information against unauthorized disclosure." Carriers challenged in three appeals courts, arguing that the fines violated their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. [...] While the Supreme Court is only taking up the AT&T and Verizon cases, the T-Mobile case would be affected by whatever ruling the Supreme Court issues. T-Mobile is seeking a rehearing in the District of Columbia Circuit, an effort that could be boosted or rendered moot by whatever the Supreme Court decides.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Weer voor Rotterdam ☁️

Huidige temperatuur (om 01:16): 7.6°C (Bewolkt)
Windsnelheid: 15.8 km/u (4.4 m/s), richting: ↙ 205°

Luchtkwaliteit:

• AQI: 27 🟢 (Goed)
• PM2.5: 6.3 μg/m³
• PM10: 8.5 μg/m³

Voorspelling voor de komende dagen:

• dinsdag 13 januari: Min 7.5°, Max 8.2° (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.8, Kans op neerslag 38%, Windsnelheid: 22.7 km/u (6.3 m/s), richting: ↓ 195°
• woensdag 14 januari: Min 5.6°, Max 8.2° (Lichte regen) 🌧️, Neerslag 4.8, Kans op neerslag 31%, Windsnelheid: 21.6 km/u (6.0 m/s), richting: ↙ 244°
• donderdag 15 januari: Min 5.8°, Max 8.3° (Zware motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 1.9, Kans op neerslag 20%, Windsnelheid: 20.2 km/u (5.6 m/s), richting: ↓ 183°
• vrijdag 16 januari: Min 6.3°, Max 10.1° (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.4, Kans op neerslag 18%, Windsnelheid: 21.9 km/u (6.1 m/s), richting: ↓ 177°
• zaterdag 17 januari: Min 3.0°, Max 6.5° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 8%, Windsnelheid: 12.6 km/u (3.5 m/s), richting: → 80°
• zondag 18 januari: Min 0.5°, Max 5.2° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 14%, Windsnelheid: 14.0 km/u (3.9 m/s), richting: → 97°
• maandag 19 januari: Min 0.9°, Max 3.7° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 30%, Windsnelheid: 9.6 km/u (2.7 m/s), richting: → 91°

Uurlijkse voorspelling voor de komende 12 uur:

• 02:00: 7.8° (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 20%, Windsnelheid: 16.6 km/u (4.6 m/s), richting: ↙ 204°
• 03:00: 7.8° (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 15%, Windsnelheid: 16.9 km/u (4.7 m/s), richting: ↙ 203°
• 04:00: 7.9° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 10%, Windsnelheid: 16.6 km/u (4.6 m/s), richting: ↙ 209°
• 05:00: 8.1° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 6%, Windsnelheid: 16.2 km/u (4.5 m/s), richting: ↙ 207°
• 06:00: 7.9° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 2%, Windsnelheid: 16.2 km/u (4.5 m/s), richting: ↙ 206°
• 07:00: 8.2° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 2%, Windsnelheid: 14.4 km/u (4.0 m/s), richting: ↓ 198°
• 08:00: 7.8° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 6%, Windsnelheid: 13.7 km/u (3.8 m/s), richting: ↓ 197°
• 09:00: 7.9° (Mist) 🌫️, Kans op neerslag 14%, Windsnelheid: 13.0 km/u (3.6 m/s), richting: ↓ 186°
• 10:00: 7.7° (Mist) 🌫️, Kans op neerslag 25%, Windsnelheid: 11.9 km/u (3.3 m/s), richting: ↓ 170°
• 11:00: 7.6° (Mist) 🌫️, Kans op neerslag 45%, Windsnelheid: 13.7 km/u (3.8 m/s), richting: ↓ 165°
• 12:00: 7.7° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 70%, Windsnelheid: 14.0 km/u (3.9 m/s), richting: ↓ 177°
• 13:00: 7.8° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 84%, Windsnelheid: 13.3 km/u (3.7 m/s), richting: ↓ 171°

Gegevens geleverd door Open-Meteo

#Rotterdam #Meteo #MeteoBot #MeteoNetherlands #OpenMeteo #FediMeteo

Mijn zoon van 5 jaar had overduidelijk geen zin om naar school te gaan. Hij gaf aan dat hij wel erg warm was en beter bij oma kon blijven.

Volgens het Centraal Planbureau zouden de huurders van 12.000 corporatiewoningen er zelf ook een koopwoning op nahouden, en die verhuren.

Last week, we talked about one huge question, “How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?” That’s pretty specific to this current moment, but there are some timeless, more perennial questions I've been sharing with friends for years that I wanted to give to all of you. They're a short list of questions that help you judge whether a job that you’re considering is going to crush your soul or not.

Obviously, not everyone is going to get to work in an environment that has perfect answers to all of these questions; a lot of the time, we’re lucky just to get a place to work at all. But these questions are framed in this way to encourage us all to aspire towards roles that enable us to do our best work, to have the biggest impact, and to live according to our values.

The Seven Questions

• If what you do succeeds, will the world be better?

This question originally started for me when I would talk to people about new startups, where people were judging the basic idea of the product or the company itself, but it actually applies to any institution, at any size. If the organization that you’re considering working for, or the team you’re considering joining, is able to achieve their stated goals, is it ultimately going to have a positive effect? Will you be proud of what it means? Will the people you love and care about respect you for making that choice, and will those with the least to gain feel like you’re the kind of person who cares about their impact on the world?

• Whose money do they have to take to stay in business?

Where does the money in the organization really come from? You need to know this for a lot of reasons. First of all, you need to be sure that they know the answer. (You’d be surprised how often that’s not the case!) Even if they do know the answer, it may make you realize that those customers are not the people whose needs or wants you’d like to spend most of your waking hours catering to. This goes beyond the simple basics of the business model — it can be about whether they're profitable or not, and what the corporate ownership structure is like.

It’s also increasingly common for companies to mistake those who are investing in a company with those who are their customers. But there’s a world of difference between those who are paying you, and those who you have to pay back tenfold. Or thousandfold.

The same goes for nonprofits — do you know who has to stay happy and smiling in order for the institution to stay stable and successful? If you know those answers, you'll be far more confident about the motivations and incentives that will drive key decisions within the organization.

• What do you have to believe to think that they’re going to succeed? In what way does the world have to change or not change?

Now we’re getting a little bit deeper into thinking about the systems that surround the organization that you’re evaluating. Every company, every institution, even every small team, is built around a set of invisible assumptions. Many times, they’re completely reasonable assumptions that are unlikely to change in the future. But sometimes, the world you’re working in is about to shift in a big way, or things are built on a foundation that’s speculative or even unrealistic.

Maybe they're assuming there aren't going to be any big new competitors. Perhaps they think they'll always remain the most popular product in their category. Or their assumptions could be about the stability of the rule of law, or a lack of corruption — more fundamental assumptions that they've never seen challenged in their lifetime or in their culture, but that turn out to be far more fragile than they'd imagined.

Thinking through the context that everyone is sharing, and reflecting on whether they’re really planning for any potential disruptions, is an essential part of judging the psychological health of an organization. It’s the equivalent of a person having self-awareness, and it’s just as much of a red flag if it’s missing.

• What’s the lived experience of the workers there whom you trust? Do you have evidence of leaders in the organization making hard choices to do the right thing?

Here is how we can tell the culture and character of an organization. If you’ve got connections into the company, or a backchannel to workers there, finding out as much information as you can about the real story of its working conditions is often one of the best ways of understanding whether it’s a fit for your needs. Now, people can always have a bad day, but overall, workers are usually very good at providing helpful perspectives about their context.

And more broadly, if people can provide examples of those in power within an organization using that power to take care of their workers or customers, or to fight for the company to be more responsible, then you’ve got an extremely positive sign about the health of the place even before you’ve joined. It’s vital that these be stories you are able to find and discover on your own, not the ones amplified by the institution itself for PR purposes.

• What were you wrong about?

And here we have perhaps one of the easiest and most obvious ways to judge the culture of an organization. This is even a question you can ask people while you’re in an interview process, and you can judge their responses to help form your opinion. A company, and leadership culture, that can change its mind when faced with new information and new circumstances is much more likely to adapt to challenges in a healthy way. (If you want to be nice, phrase it as "What is a way in which the company has evolved or changed?")

• Does your actual compensation take care of what you need for all of your current goals and needs — from day one?

This is where we go from the abstract and psychological goals to the practical and everyday concerns: can you pay your bills? The phrasing and framing here is very intentional: are they really going to pay you enough? I ask this question very specifically because you’d be surprised how often companies actually dance around this question, or how often we trick ourselves into hearing what we want to hear as the answer to this question when we’re in the exciting (or stressful) process of considering a new job, instead of looking at the facts of what’s actually written in black-and-white on an offer letter.

It's also important not to get distracted with potential, even if you're optimistic about the future. Don’t listen to promises about what might happen, or descriptions of what’s possible if you advance in your role. Think about what your real life will be like, after taxes, if you take the job that they’ve described.

• Is the role you’re being hired into one where you can credibly advance, and where there’s sufficient resources for success?

This is where you can apply your optimism in a practical way: can the organization accurately describe how your career will proceed within the company? Does it have a specific and defined trajectory, or does it involve ambiguous processes or changes in teams or departments? Would you have to lobby for the support of leaders from other parts of the organization? Would making progress require acquiring new skills or knowledge? Have they committed to providing you with the investment and resources required to learn those skills?

These questions are essential to understand, because lacking these answers can lead to an ugly later realization that even an initially-exciting position may turn out to be a dead-end job over time.

Towards better working worlds

Sometimes it can really feel like the deck is stacked against you when you're trying to find a new job. It can feel even worse to be faced with an opportunity and have a nagging sense that something is not quite right. Much of the time, that feeling comes from the vague worry that we're taking a job that is going to make us miserable.

Even in a tough job market, there are some places that are trying to do their best to treat people decently. In larger organizations, there are often pockets of relative sanity, led by good leaders, who are trying to do the right thing. It can be a massive improvement in quality of life if you can find these places and use them as foundations for the next stage of your career.

The best way to navigate towards these better opportunities is to be systematic when evaluating all of your options, and to hold out for as high standards as possible when you're out there looking. These seven questions give you the tools to do exactly that.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Bijna 12.000 mensen die een huis huren van een woningcorporatie zijn ook eigenaar van één of meerdere woningen. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van het Centraal Planbureau (CPB). Hoewel het maar een klein aantal (0,5 procent) van alle corporatiehuurders betreft, roept het volgens het CPB vragen op over "passend gebruik van schaarse sociale huurwoningen".

Huizen van woningcorporaties, meestal sociale huurwoningen, zijn er om mensen die niet zelfstandig op de vrije markt kunnen huren te voorzien van een woning. Maar bij vijf op de zes huurders die ook een woning bezitten, is dat in strijd met deze wettelijke taak van woningcorporaties.

In een op de zes gevallen bezit een huurder een extra woning door persoonlijke omstandigheden zoals een scheiding of het overlijden van een ouder. Dit botst niet met de doelstelling van de corporaties, zegt het CPB.

Problematisch

In de andere 10.000 gevallen is het gebruik van de huurwoning dus wel problematisch. Vaak wonen de huiseigenaren dan in sociale huurwoningen en verhuren ze hun koophuis om er geld mee te verdienen. In een op de tien gevallen bezitten huurders meer dan één woning. Enkele tientallen zijn eigenaar van meer dan tien huizen.

Ook gebruiken sommige mensen hun tweede woning voor het huisvesten van een naaste of maken ze zelf gebruik van de tweede woning. Dit botst volgens het CPB ook met het doel van woningcorporaties.

Huiseigenaren vallen ook op basis van hun inkomen buiten de doelgroep van de corporaties. Meer dan de helft heeft een hoger inkomen dan dat van mensen die recht hebben op sociale huur. De eigenaren verdienen gemiddeld 76,4 procent meer dan andere corporatiehuurders. Ook huren de woningbezitters vaak aantrekkelijkere corporatiewoningen dan andere sociale huurders.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Demissionair minister David van Weel (Buitenlandse Zaken) heeft gesproken met interim-president Delcy Rodríguez van Venezuela. Dat laat de VVD-bewindsman weten op X. Rodríguez leidt het Zuid-Amerikaanse land sinds Amerikaanse militairen eerder deze maand de autoritaire leider Nicolás Maduro gevangennamen. Zij was eerder vicepresident.

Van Weel zegt "vooruitgang" te zien op belangrijke kwesties in Venezuela, waaronder de vrijlating van buitenlandse gevangenen. Of daar ook Nederlanders bij zitten, wil zijn ministerie tot dusver niet zeggen. De minister noemt het verder belangrijk om "onze communicatiekanalen open te houden".

Venezuela is het grootste buurland van het Caribische deel van het koninkrijk. De eilanden Aruba, Curaçao en Bonaire liggen slechts enkele tientallen kilometers van de Venezolaanse kust.

HILVERSUM (ANP) - Alle problemen op het spoor door het winterweer zorgden ervoor dat de NS-app vorige week maandag 28 miljoen keer werd geraadpleegd. Nooit eerder waren er zoveel bezoekers in de app, wat voor technische problemen zorgde, zei NS-directeur Wouter Koolmees maandagavond aan tafel bij Pauw & De Wit. "De vorige piek was bij de stakingen vorige zomer, toen 12 miljoen reizigers de app raadpleegden", aldus Koolmees.

Op een gemiddelde dag wordt de NS-app volgens de president-directeur zo'n 2 miljoen keer geopend. Door de vele verzoeken in de NS-app dacht het systeem afgelopen maandag dat er sprake was van ddos-aanvallen. Bij een ddos-aanval wordt zoveel internetverkeer naar een server gestuurd dat deze het niet meer aankan.

Hoewel van een cyberaanval geen sprake was, stonden "reizigers een paar uur zonder reisinformatie", aldus Koolmees. "Dat is onze grootste nachtmerrie: onze reizigers staan op het perron en weten niet of ze naar huis kunnen komen."

@odd you forget that writing has the purpose of being read. If no one can write, how can we be certain they can still read? I bet that they don't understand what the LLM is writing for them, they just assume.

Some thoughts about Obsidian and creating a PDF out of that markdown.
https://xiffy.nl/blog/on-writing/
#obsidian #pandoc #latex

In SEC filings, Fortinet and Palo Alto show shrinking product margins taking hold.

PCs and datacenters aren't the only devices that need DRAM. The global memory shortage is roiling the cybersecurity market, with the cost of firewalls expected to balloon and hit both customers and vendors in the pocketbook in 2026, according to research analysts Wedbush.…

Gang members 'systematically exploited children and young people,' cops say

A 21-year-old Swedish man accused of being a key organizer of violence-as-a-service linked to the Foxtrot criminal network, which police say has recruited and exploited minors, has been arrested in Iraq.…

Cello Octet Conjunto Ibérico

Cello Octet Conjunto Ibérico

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: